


trothplight

by arriviste



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Era, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-27
Updated: 2019-07-27
Packaged: 2020-07-09 19:15:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19892944
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arriviste/pseuds/arriviste
Summary: “What a metaphor,” Grantaire said bitterly. “I may dress your windows, but no more. We’ll greet each other in the streets, but you won’t admit me to your chambers or your hearts. I know all the words, all the empty speeches one needs to mouth for membership – I can rattle them off as well as you. Want me to prate Hébert or praise the Supreme Deity? Quote Rousseau or Marat? I can mum them; I don’t, because I don’t mean them, and because I’m an honest sceptic, I’m untrustworthy.”





	trothplight

**Author's Note:**

> _"It's raiding," said Joly. "I have sworn to go through fire, but not through water. I don't wand to ged a gold."_  
>  Les Miserables, “Preliminary Gaieties."

“Do you think you can bear a great deal of nonsense?” Courfeyrac asked. “It’s poetic stuff – some comes to us from the higher chapters, but our own Prouvaire had his part in its composition.”

“You might have got me drunk first,” Grantaire grumbled, stripping. Coat, waistcoat, cravat, braces. Shoes. Shirt. His trousers? No. It was cold, for April. In the evening air the flesh was rising on his arms and thighs. He had no need to be ashamed, but his belly had softened with drink and dissolution since the last time he’d stripped for a bout, and even if no one was planning to best him physically this evening, he was conscious of wishing to cut a better figure than he did.

“That’s what Bahorel’s mistress said to me last night!”

“That’s no compliment to you!” Bahorel called out from across the courtyard.

“Is he ready?” Enjolras asked, stepping out of the shadows, and the hoots died away. 

He was bare-headed and in shirtsleeves, holding a candle which painted his throat yellow and pink and made his cropped head look like a bronze helmet above a billow of linen.

Courfeyrac said, “He is.” 

“Not quite,” Combeferre said, and came at Grantaire with a strip of cloth. “Easy – you can’t see this thing.” 

“You come blind and vulnerable to us as we all come into the world,” Prouvaire said, and his rather sweet smile was the last thing Grantaire saw before Combeferre finished binding his eyes.

-

“Me? I wouldn’t betray you,” Grantaire had said, a little surprised at the seriousness of the question, and of the faces turned to him, and then, as always, temporised. “– Inasmuch as there is anything to betray; I don’t expect your little coterie to be of much interest to the gendarmerie, unless you move from explosive rhetoric to explosives themselves. They can hardly convict you – unless you perform miraculous feats of multiplication when I leave you, like the fabled bread and fishes, and expand to mathematically impossible crowds. Break the law against large assembly – break the law of assembly with a mouchard amongst your number – perhaps then you’d have something to fear, but it seems to me that the only people to take an interest in your meetings at the moment, unless you take up pamphlet-pressing, would be de Rozier and d’Arlandes, not the préfet de police.”

Courfeyrac, always the first to thaw, hadn’t quite smiled, but said, “Grantaire, you don’t understand. We’re not worried you’d betray _us_ –”

“Ah,” Bahorel said, scratching his nose. “But isn’t that the problem, in a nutshell?”

Combeferre said, “What Courfeyrac means is that it isn’t personal.”

“No?” Grantaire asked, looking from face to face. He wasn’t surrounded, quite, but he’d had the sense that a circle was closing around and behind him. Joly and Bossuet were absent, and Grantaire suspected a necessary culling of his potential supporters before the Société closed its circle against him. A few moments ago the ground had been solid, and now he was aware of it cracking, as untrustworthy as the cobblestones of the Rue de l’Enfer. “It’s not that you think I’m untrustworthy; it’s that you don’t trust me? Pardon, I don’t follow.”

“No one is saying that you must be a stranger – but you’re not a compatriot, and therefore must cease to be a companion when the conversation becomes sensitive. The time for allowing you into our private counsels has passed.”

“So: you don’t trust me.” 

This time no one had demurred. 

-

They left him. At least, it seemed that they left him.

If Enjolras was still nearby, Grantaire couldn’t make out his candle through the cloth. Without his sight, his ears seemed to grow more acute; he heard the distant sound of an owl, and his own breathing. He had no sense of anyone being near; and no sense of time, because it seemed from the moment he’d been blinded and turned, not ungently, but enough to deprive him of his bearings, an hour had passed; two.

Was that the ceremony? There was none of Courfeyrac’s promised poetry. Leaving a man half-naked and shivering in some abandoned courtyard an hour from the city – what a way to test his loyalty. Grantaire had had no faith in this sacrament, and he would be pleased at being proven correct if he wasn’t so cold.

Someone said, in a voice too low to be assigned easily to any of his friends, “Why have you come?”

“I was _brought_ ,” Grantaire said, aggrieved, and heard a smothered chuckle somewhere to his left.

Sharper: _“Why have you come?”_

“To prove myself – swear an oath – black my face with charcoal; whatever you require from me.”

“Not a perfect answer, but good enough,” a third voice said, and that was Courfeyrac, which meant the chuckle had been Prouvaire, or possibly Bahorel. 

“To your knees,” the cold interrogating voice said.

“Ah,” Grantaire said, and was pinched before he could speak further by the person who placed their hands on his shoulders, aiding him to kneel. The paving stones were cold through his trousers.

Uncomfortable, too. He could be at the Corinthe or some café instead at this moment, somewhere with wine and women and warmth; why had he agreed to this ridiculous ceremony? 

-

“It’s not personal,” said Enjolras, not looking at him.

“Putain de merde, it’s not.”

Bahorel said, “Grantaire, you’re a good fellow. As Combeferre says, you’re our friend. But you’re not a member of the Société de l’Amis de l’ABC, so you can hardly complain when the Société doesn’t embrace you.”

“Unfair – I have complete trust in Grantaire’s ability to complain about anything he pleases to,” Courfeyrac said, but Grantaire hadn’t been in a mind to be charmed.

“You forbid me the Musain, in essence?”

“The back room, when matters beyond your depth are discussed, yes.” Combeferre.

“What a metaphor,” Grantaire said bitterly. “I may dress your windows, but no more. We’ll greet each other in the streets, but you won’t admit me to your chambers or your hearts. I know all the words, all the empty speeches one needs to mouth for membership – I can rattle them off as well as you. Want me to prate Hébert or praise the Supreme Deity? Quote Rousseau or Marat? I can mum them; I don’t, because I don’t mean them, and because I’m an honest sceptic, I’m untrustworthy.”

He was angry now. That was better. Simpler. 

“You allow for a supreme loyalty – to France, over God and King – but not a simpler one, of man for men. If I believe in neither god nor crown nor country, it must follow that I’m faithless. But do I need a higher authority to bind my loyalty? Isn’t my word enough?”

“Not when you don’t believe in anything sufficient to give your word on,” Enjolras said, and lifted his head to look at him at last. “We’re not playing games, Grantaire. If we gamble, it’s with our lives and our liberty as stakes; and not only ours now. Perhaps you’re loyal to us, I grant you that; but to men unknown to you, who trust us in brotherhood?”

“Unfair,” Grantaire said, and looked away from Enjolras like a man unable to look any longer at the sun. “I have my own allegiance.”

“I know you do, capital-R,” Courfeyrac said, and there had been a great deal of unexpected kindness in his voice, thick and soft as velvet, as though he had any idea at all. “But, my friend – we’re serious, now. You see?”

Grantaire said, 

“I could be serious,” and even Combeferre had smiled. That was Grantaire’s entrée among these better men, and always had been. He could make them laugh, when he wasn’t making them sick. 

“I _could_. What do you want me to swear on, if you don’t trust my word, or my friendship? What a fork you’ve pinned me with,” Grantaire said, a wail of unfairness rising like bile in his throat. “I’m fucked from both directions.”

“That’s _enough,_ ” Enjolras said. He’d spoken like the matter was ended; looked like it, too, and then he had looked at Combeferre and paused. Combeferre was frowning at Courfeyrac. “What?”

“Perhaps,” Combeferre had said, with the caution that always overlaid his speech unless he was transported with spirit, “we do owe you a chance to swear, Grantaire.”

Enjolras’s brows drew together. “How so?”

“If we could accept that he holds something sacred to swear by,” Combeferre said, and looked to Courfeyrac for confirmation of whatever thesis he was entertaining.

It was foolish to think that the execution had been stayed, but the air in the room seemed suddenly different, and Grantaire felt – not hope, but that the argument was in progress for the first time, not already neatly blotted and sanded and sealed up, a judgment delivered to him as a fiat.

Courfeyrac nodded, and “ _Would_ you swear?” Combeferre asked.

“Swear what, exactly?”

“You mentioned the law against assembly; a prophylactic against organised rebellion. Prevent men from gathering together in any group larger than twenty, and you prevent sedition. Or so our Bourbon and his deputies believe. We are only eight. What can eight do?”

“Very little,” Grantaire said, scornful despite himself, and caught the brief golden flash of Enjolras’s eyelashes as his eyes finally turned to him in the lamplight.

They were all looking at him now.

“Very little,” Combeferre agreed. “Now imagine another such small group. And another, and another; a hundred. A thousand. What could they do?”

“Nothing, if they’re not linked together,” Grantaire said, a schoolboy following his master’s logic – and then insight struck him, like a blow to the head, and he groaned. “ _Tell_ me you haven’t joined the charbonnerie.”

“How could I tell you that? They don’t exist anymore, as they were.”

“That’s not a negation,” Grantaire said, and looked to Courfeyrac. “You’re smarter than that, surely? No, what am I talking about; you probably think it’s perfectly jolly to embrace yet more confreres to your bosom.”

Courfeyrac shook his head, smiling slightly.

“Lafayette himself was a Carbonari,” Enjolras said, which paid for all, evidently. 

He had always been a less perfect tutor than Combeferre, apt to rest upon revolutionary authority, to set that seal as _quod erat demonstrandum_ without fore-going proof. 

“The charbonnerie don’t exist anymore,” Combeferre said, still watching Grantaire, “but the Société des Amis du Peuple does, and we are – in communication, perhaps, as well as communion.”

“So you’re not asking me to swear to you,” Grantaire said, and this – this was a different thing that pledging his words to his friends; this was his head in a halter, a more serious enterprise than he had thought. “You want me to swear to _them_.”

“We’re the same.”

“And if I said I could only swear to the singular, and not the plural?”

“Then, regretfully, we return to the original point,” Combeferre said. “We can’t put other lives than ours in your hands, unless you share their risk, even if we were to trust you with ours – and for what it’s worth –” his eyes flicked Enjolras-ward again – “I find that I do. With certain of them, at least, which means all eight; for we are mutually bound."

“I do, as well,” Courfeyrac said. “At least – for Les Amis, yes. I do.”

Bahorel nodded his own consent. He was the old hand here, first blooded in 1820 and many times since. Grantaire realised, suddenly, that he must have been one of the original Carbonari when the others were all still schoolboys, more serious in his revolt than he appeared. Bahorel was a natural contrarian and a natural fighter, and rebellion was his metier; now the tension of the room had loosened, cut by the knife of his consent.

Enjolras folded his arms across his breast, the last of them to deliver judgment. “You know enough to set the mouchards on us now,” he said. “More than I would have told you; but my judgment is not the only or the final word. Will you swear?”

-

“Will you swear?” the cold voice asked, and Grantaire swayed a little forward on his knees.

“I never swear to anything if I don’t know what I’m swearing to,” he said, still stubborn. “I may be fond of wine and I may cheat at dominoes, but I don’t cheat much when I play for money, and I don’t give my word without meaning it.”

“Again; not perfect, but quite satisfactory,” Courfeyrac said from behind him. “Carry on.”

Someone grasped his hand and put something in it, and Grantaire curled his fingers reflexively around the shaft. “What,” he began, and Prouvaire said, “The fasces – for justice and for retribution. For remembrance.” 

It was an axe, tilting dangerously in his hand, the heavy head dragging it down. “Remembrance of what?”

“That if you were to fail in this you would be killed, and your body cut up and burned, and your ashes scattered to the winds,” Prouvaire said, his sweet voice cracking with passion in the middle of his speech, and the hands on Grantaire’s shoulders – Bahorel or Combeferre’s, by process of elimination, and Grantaire was going to return that pinch with interest later – quivered a little, laughter communicating itself through wrists and tendons to fingers. 

“He wrote that bit himself,” Courfeyrac said, sotto voce, and then “Oh, damn, we’ve forgotten the candle.”

“Someone give him the candle,” someone – Combeferre – Enjolras? said, and one was pressed into Grantaire’s other hand, a cool taper which from the scent of it had only been burning a short time. 

“What does this represent? The fire that will burn my body into ash?”

_“Hush.”_

“Well, yes,” Prouvaire said, sounding a little annoyed. “Also, it symbolises the spirit of charity which must always burn in your breast; the charity you must show your brothers.”

“You hold the fasces and the flame,” the cool voice said – Enjolras or Combeferre? “Will you swear by them to keep your word and your silence, to protect and shelter your brothers and render them all possible assistance?”

The fasces and the flame; an absurd way of referring to an old axe and a candle-end. The former tried to invest its object with the stern republican virtue of Roman, the spare discipline of perfect democracy; the second, with the eternal, with the ever-burning hearth of a severe vestal goddess or the fire in the desert, a small circle of men gathered together and talking with the tongues of angels. 

Grantaire could swear by axe and candle and mean very little by it; he could swear by fasces and flame and mean something deeper and higher, something which for him had flesh and walked beside him and was untouchable, who was flame and fasces incarnate and incorruptible, hot in his froideur and cool in his ardency. He would mean not the unknown members of the Amis du Peuple, an undoubted rabble of students and workmen and petty-bourgeois, ink-stained journalists who stoked fires with their pamphlets and then let the men who printed them take the heat, the milky-liberal second-generation republicans and the ragtag remnants of the Carbonari-charbonnerie, the illegitimate sons of the Grand Armée – 

“I swear,” Grantaire said seriously, and he wasn’t thinking of the unknown members of the Amis du Peuple but of Bahorel and Prouvaire and Joly and Bossuet, Combeferre and Feuilly and Courfeyrac and Enjolras. This was a foolish and ridiculous rite, but if it let him somehow prove his friendship –They would be fools to rely on his assistance, and they weren’t that, but he wouldn’t betray them; that, at least, never.

\- 

“You’re quite welcome.”

“I’ll save my thanks until I know what this ritual entails,” Grantaire said. “Hébertist catechisms: I can recite them until my tongue is numb, and I will, if that’s what’s required. Property is an outrage against the rights of the human race; I can say that without smirking. I can talk about faith, hope, and charity, with some vaguely Rousseauist notions of natural virtue thrown in; that will be harder, but I think I can manage. I’ll say whatever you like, like a sailor’s parrot – but that’s not why you agreed to let me swear.”

“No,” Combeferre said, and then, “Are you familiar with the maxims de Rochefoucauld, Grantaire?”

Any Frenchman could say as much; but glancing familiarity didn’t mean that he knew them well enough to follow Combeferre’s dialogic method of instruction.

“--Somewhat.”

“He had a physician’s precision in making a diagnosis when symptoms present in a similar fashion for very different maladies. Rochefoucauld believed that love could be distinguished from mere desire, simply by observing whether it made more of an impression on the senses than the soul. If the senses, that is appetite. If the soul – well. He thought that love formed the soul, the heart and the mind according to its nature; that it does not adapt to the size of the heart or mind it fills, but has its own size.” 

So even an ignoble man might harbour a noble love. “That’s not necessarily a flattering observation.”

Combeferre made a face. “Say rather, that the ability to love, as Rochefoucauld defines love, distinguishes the lover as a man of greater ability than the sum of his parts; for he aspires to be greater than he is.”

“ _If_ the malady is diagnosed correctly.”

“There is that difficulty, yes.”

“Hm,” Grantaire said, and then said nothing more, and the night filled with the nearing sound of hoof-beats and the rattling of the wheel-rims, the distant hansom Courfeyrac and Bahorel had left to hail drawing near.

-

Grantaire was back in his rooms a few hours before dawn. The lantern-lights were still lit on the boulevards, but even the grossest guinguettes and bistrots had put up their shutters. Baker’s hours; conspirator’s hours, hours when battling Carlists and Philippists, fire-eating members of the former charbonnerie and the wistful would-be sons of the Grand Armée pass messages in the streets and print pamphlets in the cellars and stab each other to death in skirmishes near the river – and, apparently, swear bonds of loyalty to one another in strange rituals. A wasp’s nest Grantaire had never wished to put his foot in; an endless struggle in the shadows that has only ever made him weary.

He had stripped to his linen again when a knock sounded upon his door. Either the mouchards were better informed than he thought them likely to be, the police more men of action than seedy stalkers stinking of stale wine, or the concierge had come to rail at him again for waking him for admittance at such a putrid hour.

Or – 

“Enjolras,” Grantaire said, opening the door a fraction. Then, testing his new allegiance, “Chief?”

Enjolras didn’t quite snort; his nostrils were too finely made for that. He was wearing his black coat again, and a hard look, and Grantaire fell back before him.

Once inside, Enjolras kept looking at him, and kept saying nothing, and finally Grantaire expostulated;

“Am I to be kept from sleeping until I’ll tell you anything you wish to hear, on the promise of a few hours in the arms of oblivion? What more must I do to be believed, or is there no end to my labours?”

“As if you believed in any of it.”

“What was the point of that pageantry, if _you_ didn’t mean it?” 

“It means something to them.”

“Not to you?”

“A man can be trusted, or he can’t. The rituals themselves only bind those who believe already, or make certain that we’ll hang together after. They don’t enforce obedience; or silence.”

“What, you _don’t_ believe my bones will burn and my ashes scatter to the four winds if I inform on you?”

“I can promise you they will, if you let yourself be caught by me afterwards.”

Grantaire said, “I’m far too lazy to betray you.”

“So why persist in joining in a cause you don’t believe in?”

More lightly still: “I would miss my time studying your physiognomy; it’s better value than any class at the Académie.” 

Enjolras said shortly, “This is why I said it was useless to allow you to swear. Combeferre said you could be believed, and I must believe him. I do believe him. But–”

“Yes. Yes; I don’t believe in your Republic,” Grantaire said. “It’s a pretty idea, but our fathers botched it; who are we to do any better? You can’t make water run back uphill, and blood is harder still. But if I won’t tilt at the windmill, I won’t tear its wings off, either.”

He took a breath; and then a deeper one. They were standing far closer together than they’d been in the empty garden, when Enjolras’s cool questions had forced a hard truth out of Grantaire at the last that he’d barely believed he held. He could smell the faint woolsy-damp of Enjolras's coat, and fainter still, the scent of his hair.

As seriously as he could, he said, “I may be useless, but I won’t be harmful.”

“I want to believe you.”

“But you don’t.”

“You use so many words to say so little.” 

“How many more before I may be allowed to sleep?”

“A few more,” Enjolras said, and took Grantaire by the shoulders like he meant to shake him. “It’s not a game any longer. It never was, but now – Why should I trust you with their lives? Why persist? _Tell me._ ” 

“I did,” Grantaire said. “I'll give you my honesty, but not my very soul; you’ll get no more from me.” 

The way Enjolras was looking at him was too sharp, too close. His eyes had no colour in the low light, but his hair was bright, the bones of his face sharp in distinctions of shape and shadow. “I saw something in you tonight,” he said. 

Of all the long pauses that evening, the one which followed was the most fraught. 

“What did you see?” Grantaire asked, before he thought better of it. He didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t want to know what Enjolras saw; he only hoped that the usual astigmatism which afflicted their chief when it came to matters of the heart and the body, things he cared nothing for, continued to obscure his vision.

“I believe that you care for our friends,” Enjolras said. “And –”

“And?”

“And,” Enjolras said, and let go of him. “Go back to bed,” he said. “I’ll take the chair.”

“You don’t trust me not to run immediately to the Sûreté?”

“I mean to get some sleep, not to keep watch on you.”

“ – You mean to sleep _here_?” 

“I often have occasion to lodge after curfew with brothers of the Société.”

If Enjolras asked him again, Grantaire would say that that had been why he insisted on being permitted to swear: to hear Enjolras bracket him with his brothers in arms, however delicately. That was enough. Instead, playing such a brother, he said,

“I comprehend! I thought you were a policeman when you came to my door; if you were followed, they’ll know me for one of your number if you leave again so soon. I see. Very well – Take the bed.”

“If they don’t arrest me for being about at this hour,” Enjolras agreed. “But the chair will be sufficient.”

Grantaire consigned the chair and its horsehair stuffing to perdition at some voluble length. “I’ll take it; there’s no need for you to play a victim to Procrustes.”

“If the chair is so unsuitable, two can share your bed, I suspect. And have?” 

He glanced around the room like it was alive with the shapes of Grantaire’s past lovers, like he might espy a woman’s corset tossed into a corner, a pair of men’s boots kicked aside. 

“Not _lately_ ,” Grantaire said, “though I doubt its size has altered.” 

Enjolras nodded like something had been settled, and then began to remove his coat. Then he threw it over the despised chair. He was stripping efficiently to his underlinen when Grantaire gave up the struggle not to stare and snuffed out the candle.

He had slept in friendship with their friends before, too; drunken Jolys and Courfeyracs and Bahorels and Bossuets had filled his bed, his chairs, his floor, their thick breath on his neck and loud snores in his ear. Enjolras was not one of him, and not only because he was unsettlingly quiet as they made ready to sleep and to share the bed, his every movement somehow weighted as though this was a ritual, too, the true test that Grantaire had to pass.

The true trial, the greater agony; waiting not alone on his knees but accompanied in his bed, imagining not an axe but an invisible sword of virtue between them.

Until Enjolras said, sounding – almost – amused, “Are you usually so stiff at night?”

“I – oh, you _cannot_ expect me to answer that in all seriousness,” Grantaire said, and some of the terror lifted. “Even if you have asked me to be serious.”

“I might have enjoyed hearing your tongue all tied in knots.” 

“I will show seriousness now by not suggesting that you could have that any time you like.”

“Take care,” Enjolras said – and oh, a pause; “I _might_ take you seriously for once.”

“Then," Grantaire said, for robbery serious was to sink, "Ill keep my tongue to myself, although I believe it to be customary to settle a troth with a kiss of peace.”

“That sounds like something Prouvaire might have invented,” Enjolras observed. There was a pause. Then, “Well?”

“Well _what_?”

“A kiss of peace,” Enjolras said, and the mattress ticking shifted again as he rolled onto his side. 

“I wouldn’t so presume.”

“Then I must,” Enjolras said, and leaned over in the bed to kiss him. He was clumsy, but not gentle; a query in the night, bent on having at last an answer.

Grantaire had determined not to betray himself under any kind of questioning, any more than he would betray the Société; but this was an interrogation he could not be expected to withstand, untutored as it was, and with a groan he clutched at the back of Enjolras’s head to keep it bent down to his. 

They kissed like that, harsh and shallow, until Grantaire couldn’t bear it any longer and surged up from the mattress. Enjolras’s mouth opened under his in surprise as Grantaire rolled him onto his back, and while it was permitted, he got his hands into Enjolras’s hair; groped skin-hungry at his jaw, the back of his neck, the warm curve of his shoulder.

Enjolras bit his lip for that trespass, but his shirt parted easily under Grantaire’s hands, pushed more easily still off his shoulders – it still smelled strongly of candle-smoke – and when he put his mouth on what he had bared, throat and chest and stomach, Enjolras only knotted his hands in his hair and let him.

Something savage with teeth and claws had been unleashed in the dark room, wordless between them, and Grantaire licked and kissed and sucked and bit, down nipple and ribcage past belly to the cloth band of drawers; tugged his way into them, parted them, found silk-shiny groin where the skin was hot and stiff. Enjolras was breathing with faint restraint, but he lifted his hips enough that Grantaire could work them down his thighs. He would have given anything just then for a little light, enough to see Enjolras on his back in his bed with his shirt sliding down his arms and his smallclothes open.

“ _Your_ clothes,” Enjolras said, clear voice thickened, the only thing he’d said since he’d kissed him, and Grantaire pulled his own shirt over his head with savage impatience, tore at the lacings at his waist, and then Enjolras’s hands in the dark found his hips.

It was quick after that. Enjolras’s cock hard in his hand, his unstrung sounds in Grantaire’s ear. His face turned into Grantaire’s neck, the sweat-dampness between his thighs, oil making everything easier still; the throb of him in Grantaire’s palm and the slide of skin in hand and against belly between legs; the pulse and shudder of it all, first Enjolras and then Grantaire after him. 

"This is how you share your bed with your brothers of the Société?" Grantaire asked, as sweat and seed cooled. "You slip into their beds and make a fleshly consummation?" 

"What would you say if I said it was?" Enjolras said, and his voice was his own again. "What would you do?"

“Oh, run out into the street and go straight to the Sureté, certainly. That’s why you went to bed with me, isn’t it? To make certain of my silence, or to find my weakness; you’ll have to tell me which. A bone thrown to a dog?"

“I didn't look to mock you,” Enjolras said. “I looked to see what you would do. Until tonight, you offered me only slyness, and sideways glances; you wonder that I doubted?"

"I wonder at your methods of _proving_ it."

Enjolras sat up. Enough light was coming in around the shutters now that the white shape of his shoulders was clear, and the darkness of his eyes and mouth in his pale face. His hair was like a trampled wheat-field. "I do not lie with my brothers in the Société," he said. "I thought I saw something more in you. Was I wrong?"

The longest and most dangerous pause yet. If Grantaire had the courage of his convictions, he would speak now, and openly; declare his love like an oath, and take the consequences, rise unashamed and put out his hand.

"Did I offer you pure coin as well as base, you'd test it with your teeth before you took it, if you didn't throw it to the floor." 

Enjolras said, "The streets are almost safe, if you want me to leave. We meet next Friday in the backroom, the _vente_. You're not required to attend, but you may."

Coin for coin.

“Chief,” Grantaire said roughly.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote about 60% of this in 2015(!) and then didn't look at it again for an age, but I always found the Joly line - "I have sworn to go through fire" - interesting, because while Hugo doesn't spend much time telling us about how Les Amis de l'ABC fit in with the broader revolutionary movement, it indicates that they were modelled on the charbonnerie or the Amis du Peuple, which had such rituals. Some weird 1820s-1830s secret republican society facts:
> 
> The Carbonari was an informal network of secret revolutionary societies active in Italy from about 1800 to 1831. The Italian Carbonari further influenced other revolutionary groups in France, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Brazil and Uruguay; indeed in France the fragment was called the Charbonnerie, founded in 1821 and led by Lafayette as an anti-Restoration rebublican group, and it didn't disband until 1830. Populated by "young intellectuals who came together in the milieu of the jeunesse des écoles", I think it's a clear model for the ABC and was historically the founding-ground for the Amis du Peuple. 
> 
> The charbonnerie had an initiation ritual I have borrowed lightly from, because it was too ridiculous and in some cases religious to imagine Enjolras lifting wholly. It began in a wood or garden, 'with a moment of reflection, after which the postulant would declare that he had come to the good cousins in search of truth and in order to learn to conquer his passions. He was then blindfolded and led around an obstacle course of tree trunks, confronted with blazing flames which symbolised the spirit of charity that must always burn in his breast, and swore a series of catechisms, proclaiming the principal virtues to be faith, hope, and charity, with some vaguely Rousseauist notions of ‘natural virtue’ thrown in. Initiation into the higher grades could take the form of a simulacrum of the Passion and crucifixion of Christ, and the paraphernalia – cloaks, daggers, axes, fire, wine, chalices, and blood - was a mix of Roman and Catholic, while the printed matter bristled with crosses, crowns of thorns, suns, moons, cocks, fasces, ladders, representations of St Theobald.
> 
> The Société des Familles, which was founded in 1834, operated in cells of 8-12 people - again, about the same size as l'ABC, so I really would like to shake Hugo down for his secret society backstory for them - and each cell (vente) was known as a family, its leader the 'father' who could communicate with other cells.


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